What’s happening

and what it means to you

The news at 10

27.02.2020 – Fine Wine Investment –

We mentioned recently that the Liv-ex members hadn’t exactly covered themselves in glory with their forecasts for fine wine index levels last year, so how much notice should we take of this year’s efforts? Absolutely none at all, is the answer! We are not being disrespectful to them in any way, (we number ourselves amongst them!) but the nature of average forecasts means they are inevitably compromised by the level of expertise brought to bear in aggregate.

Even if one of the answers was supplied by one of Dominic
Cummings’s superforecasters it inevitably gets lost in the melee. This year’s
range is +45% to -30% which is a colossal spread of 7500 basis points! In
essence it is a bit of fun with the winner earning something nice and bubbly
from the Liv-ex, but whether that winner actually knows anything more than
anyone else is a moot point. As Mr Cummings’s forecasting guru Philip Tetlock
points out, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance.

We are all on much firmer ground looking at the performance
of the 2010s as they reach their first decade of age (grape age, not wine age,
strictly speaking), and there will be a series of reviews this year reminding
everyone of how fabulous they are. That they are fabulous on the palate has
never been in dispute; but how fabulous are they now from an investment
perspective?

Not only have the 2010s in Bordeaux performed poorly since
release with nearly half of the Liv-ex 500’s 50 constituents trading below
their release price according to a brief note released recently by the Liv-ex,
but the First Growths in particular have declined. Right bank First Growth
“equivalents” like Cheval Blanc and Ausone feature among the fallers (the
elevation of Pavie and Angelus to Grand Cru Classe A since release of their
2010s guarantees their position amongst the risers), as does La Mission Haut
Brion.

What we find very interesting is that Le Pin has outstripped
all to a price rise of 95%. Why might this be? Did Pin release at a more
respectable price than the others? Nope. Not at all. Like nearly everyone they
released ex chateau at a 10% hike on 2009 levels. The difference, we believe,
is entirely due to the consequence of volume, and the mechanics of the market
place.

The 2010s were priced en primeur in the late spring of 2011,
only a month or so before the market correction. As a point of comparison, 600
cases of Le Pin 2010 had been priced at the top of the market, as against about
16,000 cases of Lafite. The question we must now explore is where they all
went, and what has become of them now?

In the case of Le Pin the answer is likely to be that the
2010s went in much the same direction as the 2009s and the 2008s before them.
These had long been collectors’ items, so irrespective of the ill that was to
befall the market by the summer, it is unlikely that too much will have found
their way back into the market either then (it is not desperately easy to
“on-trade” en primeur, although easier for Le Pin than most) or when they
became physical in 2013.

This, in fact, is what happened to the price of Le Pin 2010 when they became physical, and subsequently:

What happened here is that Robert Parker upgraded from an in
barrel score of 96-98 to a perfect 100 when it went into bottle, so you have
the combination of tightly held supply and a healthy upgrade. So what of a wine
in greater supply with a perfect score?

Here is La Mission Haut Brion 2009:

“Mission” is hardly produced in prodigious quantities,
making around 7,000 cases a year, but there is a huge difference between 600
and 7,500 cases in terms of where it “ends up”. Quite frankly, any producer
making thousands of cases is more concerned with getting it off the balance
sheet, than where it goes, and the same goes for the negociants.

All this means that for most producers in Bordeaux there was
no control over where the wine went, which made the market prey to the
speculative element from Asia which we know had become highly significant by
this time. And the consequence of this is simply that if you get caught re-selling
a bottle of DRC it is “woe betide” as regards getting an allocation next year,
for larger producers it is out of their control entirely.

This brings us back to the 2010s. How long does it take for speculators to offload excess supply? Unfortunately the wine market lacks statistical evidence to allow for an accurate answer to that question, so it’s pretty much guesswork. This is the price chart for Chateau Lafite 2010:

Have all the loose holders been shaken out? Lafite makes
between 15-20,000 cases per annum. That’s a lot by the standards of Le Pin and
even of La Mission Haut Brion, but in 7 years you would think there would not
be much left “in the wrong hands”. The price chart suggests that by 2016 much
of this selling had been done, but by our algorithmic measurements Lafite 2010
has been good value for a while, so there has clearly been an “after-effect”.

We await a catalyst to light the blue touch paper under
wines such as this, and maybe the reviews of this great vintage will provide
just such a spark.

We believe that investing in wine should be both enjoyable and profitable, but like any traded commodity there are risks and wine can go down in value as well as up. Amphora is an audited member of the Wine Investment Association, but neither Amphora nor the wine market in general is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Paintings produced with kind permission of the artist Michael Kidd. To see them in their full glory click here